- Client
- Protocol core contributor (anonymized)
- Outcome
- Confidential settlement
The problem
A public post alleged that an upgrade had been timed to benefit a liquidity provider, and that governance tokens had been borrowed to pass it. The post named our client. Traders began exiting, and a demand letter followed within the week.
The technical story and the legal story were already tangled. Screenshots of governance messages were circulating without dates. The upgrade itself was real; the motive was not established.
The work
We reconstructed the proposal timeline from chain data and from archives of the governance forum, then compared it to the client’s communications with the market-maker. Separate counsel reviewed the code diff so the legal team was not depending on the accused engineer to explain the change.
The investigative memo was direct about what the record showed: a poorly disclosed parameter change, no evidence of a side payment, and a governance process the protocol’s own documents had left ambiguous. That memo shaped both the public statement and the settlement position.
The result
The parties settled on confidential terms that included a corrected disclosure, a time-locked upgrade path, and no admission of fraud. The protocol adopted written rules for parameter changes above a set threshold. Our client remained with the project.